CHAPTER 16 | JAZZ IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 403
POSTWAR LATIN JAZZ AND THE “MAMBO CRAZE”
If hard bop and soul jazz emphasized jazz’s roots in the blues and gospel,
another type of postwar jazz emphasized what Jelly Roll Morton had called
the “Spanish tinge”: the Caribbean element that has been present since
jazz’s earliest manifestations.
Latin American dance music had enjoyed a North American following
since the time of Irene and Vernon Castle, before World War I (see chap-
ter 10). The Castle-led fashions for the Argentine tango and the Brazil-
ian maxixe paved the way for a series of dance fads originating in South
America and the Caribbean. The Swing Era witnessed the popularity of
the rumba, a fast dance of Cuban origin, and the slower beguine, from
Guadeloupe and Martinique. Cuban musicians such as Xavier Cugat and
Machito (Frank Grillo) found success in New York and Los Angeles leading
their own big bands in music that combined Latin music with the swing
styles already popular in the United States. Machito in particular infl u-
enced bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie, and in the late 1940s the two musi-
cians developed a style of fi ery Afro-Cuban jazz. Throughout the postwar
years, the blend of modern jazz and Caribbean rhythms resulted in new
jazz hybrids that kept a fi rm foothold in the popular sphere.
A Cuban dance that swept the United States in the postwar years was
the mambo. When “Mambo no. 5,” a record by the Mexico City–based
Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado, became an unexpected U.S. hit in 1949, its suc-
cess ushered in a “mambo craze” that lasted well into the 1950s. In addition to
records by Cuban musicians, the mambo craze spawned mainstream pop songs
like Perry Como’s 1954 hit “Papa Loves Mambo.” American dancers who found
the mambo too diffi cult were quick to embrace its easier variant, the cha-cha. In
fact, a variety of Caribbean dance rhythms became known in the United States
as “mambo,” which thus functioned as a sort of umbrella term.
One of the most infl uential musicians to emerge from the mambo craze was
Tito Puente, a “Nuyorican”—a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican extraction.
Born in 1923, he grew up admiring the Latin dance bands as well as swing musi-
cians like drummer Gene Krupa. The beginning of Puente’s career coincided
with a large-scale postwar migration of Puerto Ricans to New York that, among
other things, provided the background for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story,
described later in this chapter. As a young man Puente played timbales—the
high-pitched tom-toms characteristic of Cuban music—in Machito’s jazz band,
the Afro-Cubans. After serving in the nav y during World War II, he attended
Juilliard on the G.I. Bill, where he studied conducting and arranging. He formed
his own band in the late 1940s and in 1949 began his long recording career, which
lasted until shortly before his death in 2000.
Puente’s LP Dance Mania, recorded in December 1957 and released in 1958,
remains one of the best-selling Latin dance albums. The opening track, “El
cayuco” (LG 16.4), displays his signature combination of infectious dance rhythms
and complex arrangements. The brief vocal chorus, featuring lead singer Santito
Colón, compares the dancer to a cayuco, a small canoe, presumably because of
the back-and-forth paddling motion. As in much Latin dance music, the lyrics
seem secondary to the instrumental music, which layers melody instruments
and percussion in a rich polyrhythmic texture. The instrumental sections areK Mambo king Tito Puente
(1923–2000) leads his band
from the timbales in the
mid-1950s.LG 16.4Tito Puente172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 403 23/01/13 10:56 AM